Congress rated most conservative in 133 years (possibly ever), and Americans despise it in record numbers

Paul Breer has a blog post up this morning showing off some of the work of political science professor Keith Poole, showing that the current Congress is the most conservative Congress in the past 133 years. That's not just the House he studied, mind you. (But it is the House that's yanking the entire branch around.) Even with a Democratic Senate, House Republicans are such radical extremists that they've pulled the entire branch further to the right than it's been since before the late 1800s.

Keep that in mind, as Republicans will continue to make the same claim this fall that they've been making since the GOP got slaughtered in 2006 and 2008: their only mistakes in the past decade were not being conservative enough.

Really? This Congress is the most conservative since at least 1879. Yet its job approval rating is 11%, and has been as low as 8% in the past few months.

It's not hard to put two and two together, here.

Is there any more reasonable way to describe the modern American conservative view of the country than disturbingly delusional?

What's there not to love over the past 13 years, if you're a Republican? Even the health care reform law was a Republican idea that will vastly enrich private health insurance companies.

Is it any surprise, then, that the most conservative Congress in 133 years, during a period when conservatives have gotten essentially every single thing they've wanted for over a decade now, is one of the most – if not the most – hated in American history?

It shouldn't be. Yet what stands out in that huge mess is that if 2012 doesn't go well for the GOP, the message they'll take away from that is the same message they thought they got in 2006 and 2008: they weren't conservative enough.

The joke about the far right being America's version of the Taliban isn't going to be a joke for much longer.